Found a nettle growing under a bridge. Start of summer, I was out looking for shards of your heart between the cobblestones.

A single nettle. Tall, even gangly. Like someone had dropped a needle there and walked away. Sat on my haunches by it, feet pointing at Chimère St. and Byson across the canal. Reached out a hand as if picking a flower for a lover, gloveless. Held it between thumb and forefinger and anticipated the sting, brushing it up and down my underarms over the area where your tattoo goes. Expecting, in vain, the skin to react at all.

One day a stray walked onto the set in the middle of a scene, distracting the actresses. It was unclear how it could have got there, as no-one had seen it before it stalked into frame. We kept the film rolling, though. We got distracted – the director too, despite his reputation. That’s how it looked for a split-second. But he stayed himself. Maybe for headlines, maybe he’s just like that. He gutted the dog right there with a knife that he apparently carries on his person at all times, spilling the entrails like vague futures all over the plastic carpet.

Over on the site, you will also find the story to read so that you can know what we’re talking about. As I said back in December, when Reckoning 1 came out and you had to pay money to read it, I’m really very proud of this story. I hope you will like the story and the interview. I say things like “The bees are still here, being shipped about in big trucks all over your continent, dying, surviving, amnesiac and medicated” and “lofty basement mimeograph pipe dreams” in the interview, if that’s any carrot.

The brightness of the music: she was almost blinded
while playing the flute, absent-minded.

Rob Mitchelmore (of jamesjoycewaskorean.com) and I wrote a poem. I furnished him with the punchline and he delivered the context, proving once again that even sophisticated-seeming poetry is just dirty jokes all the way down. I’m amazed at the result and very proud of our creation, and I hope you’re proud of us too.

Back in the long-ago, in those distant foggy times when I had a Twitter account, I used to tell people to give me a topic, any topic, and I would produce for them a rhyming couplet about that. That was fun. Since I no longer have that avenue for boring and political reasons, let us say that you can email me at johannes.punkt @ gmail . com, and politely request a poem. Then, as if by magic, one will appear. I reserve the right to make it a bad poem and also to change the rules. This offer is open indefinitely. Do let your poetry- or weirdness-loving friends know. I need things to do in idle times.

Here are a few examples of such poetry, from those dark days long past:

Sometimes your thoughts are gold and you feel wise
and other times it’s like “…view 18 more replies.”

— On “The Missing Link in the Otherwise Perfect Chain of Thought”

You wear long dark gloves alone
in solidarity with stone.

— On “Statues Missing Limbs”

They rub their hands together not
for God but cuz they hatched a plot.

Out of things I have written, this is one of those I’m the most proud of. It feels a bit silly to write more than that but if you’re looking for me to convince you to buy this, consider: not only is my story really cool, the whole journal is cool. The stories and poems inside it all bear themes of environmental justice.

I don’t want to tell you what my story is about but I should tell you some of what’s in it.

The first time your worlds crossed paths you felt your fate short-circuiting.

I wrote a story where there are no bees anymore, and I know what happened but you don’t. Humans started creating mechanical or electrical bees to fertilise flowers. One of them devoted her life to it; it seems to be all she does. But her kiss is eponymous, so something must disrupt her routine. The story is about slipping, falling in love with this bumblebee-maker. This person who makes the bees that fertilise the flowers in the city.

If you like my writing — and your reading my blog seems to suggest that you do, thank you — you will like this story. If you like eco-punk or solarpunk or environmental speculative sci-fi, if you want your prose and poetry to acknowledge global warming and maybe give you an estimate of how fucked we are, you will like this journal. Will it unfuck us? No, the unfucking is a huge undertaking. But maybe it can unfuck your heart a bit and give you release, hope, all that good stuff. It is the first issue of Reckoning, hopefully the first of many.

Your father told you about magic. About the stories hanging from the ceiling of the world like carcasses in a slaughterhouse. About astronomy and astrology. You learned to draw maps of places that didn’t exist. He told you it was okay to not know the names of constellations, because you can create your own astronomical phenomena and your own myths. Sometimes it might hurt seeing lines drawn by someone else hundreds of years ago. It doesn’t matter that things go missing, because you can find them again. Outside the apartment the whole hospital was quarantined. He was talking about himself.